Columns

Saturday

James Forsyth

This election is the most important since 1983. Seldom has so much been at stake

James Forsyth on what promises to be a transformative year in politics Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future‚ as the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr rightly observed. But there are some things one can predict with (almost) total confidence: in this year there will be an election and by next Christmas one of the two main parties will have a new leader. And by the end of the summer, we will know if Britain is likely to tackle the single biggest threat to its prosperity and standing in the world: the gargantuan budget deficit, 12.6 per cent of GDP and counting. The election will divide the year. Until election day, the last remaining bubble in Britain — that of public spending — will be protected.

Saturday

James Forsyth

What Cameron really needs to think about over Christmas is why he wants to be PM

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics David Cameron is only taking a week off this Christmas. This is a pity, because he is facing a year that would test the stamina of a Spartan. From the moment politics resumes in the New Year, he’ll be in constant campaign mode. Then, if he wins, he’ll be governing a country in crisis; trying to push through unprecedented spending cuts and embarking on nothing less than the reordering of the relationship between the individual, society and the state. This may be his last chance in four years to recharge his batteries. A proper holiday would also give him some time to reflect on his style of leadership.

Matthew Parris

My claim to fame this year: I stopped a lot of people from squirting each other with milk

Every columnist, broadcaster or writer should, as each year closes, review his or her net contribution to the sum total of national good. It isn’t vain — or, if vain, it’s the vanity demanded by self-respect — that we should ask what we’ve done to change the world for the better. One hundred and ten years ago this New Year’s eve, Emile Zola will have reflected with pride on the total exoneration of Alfred Dreyfus, whose cruel traduction by the French authorities the brave writer did so much to expose. Charles Dickens deserved to spend his Christmases proudly contemplating how his stories, serialised in the daily newspapers, had awakened the Victorian conscience to the sufferings of the poor.

Saturday

James Delingpole

Watching the Climategate scandal explode makes me feel like a proud parent

It has been a weird, weird thing having a ringside seat at the messy unravelling of the greatest scientific scandal in the history of the world. The only experience in my life even vaguely similar was queuing outside the Wag club in the spring of 1988 watching all the straight people staring at us freaks, and thinking to myself: ‘God, just imagine how totally awesome it would be if this Acid House craze ever caught on.’ From a tiny germ of a story on a few specialist blogs, Climategate has gone über-viral in a way few of us sceptics could ever have dared hope.

Hugo Rifkind

Climate change has become a proxy subject for people who just want to sound off

I know Alistair Darling had left Loretto School, Musselburgh (for Aberdeen University) shortly before Andrew Marr had arrived (en route to Cambridge), but it was still odd to see the pair of them on my television last Sunday. Odd, I mean, that neither mentioned that they’d been to the same top Scottish public school, even though they were discussing whether it mattered that David Cameron had been to an English one. I was at that Scottish school, too. Decades had passed, though, so our paths didn’t cross. I remember Marr coming back once, to give us a talk on how we could all become editor of the Independent. Alas, none of us yet has. Darling was altogether more distant.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The unspeakable truth is that we lost in Iraq. We must not lose in Afghanistan too

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics Britain has fought more wars than any other country, but rarely has it suffered two defeats in a row. That humiliation is what this country is currently drifting towards, following failure in Iraq with failure in Afghanistan. Westminster might be obsessing over the Iraq inquiry’s revelations about how the decision to go to war was made, but the really important part of the inquiry’s work will come when it turns its attention to what happened after the invasion. The painful truth about Iraq, which no politician dares speak, is that Britain was defeated.

Matthew Parris

It’s time for journalists to be honest about their corrupting involvement with PR

I was due this week to interview a person I much admire, for a publication I respect, and for a fee I could more or less live with. My putative interviewee was my undoubted superior in terms both of intellect and genius: someone who has for many years managed a career with skill and flair. The parameters of the interview were benign: given the surrounding circumstances and the nature of the publication there could be no question of my wanting to embarrass or trap my interviewee. In short, this was to be a friendly interview with a capable adult conducted for the mutual advantage of both parties and (in this case) the public good. There were no imaginable elephant traps for anyone involved.

Saturday

James Forsyth

David Cameron is planning a government of GOATS and Dragons

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics There is one promise that David Cameron makes regularly that even the shadow Cabinet doesn’t believe he intends to keep: that he is going to end the era of ‘sofa government’ and bring back ‘Cabinet government’. Their experience over the past four years has taught them that real power in the Cameron Tory party rests not in the shadow Cabinet room but in the suite of offices that Cameron, George Osborne and their advisers inhabit. Rather than bringing back Cabinet government, Cameron intends to bring in a whole new style of government. The Tory command chain has Mr Cameron at the top, and those who work within a ten-metre radius of him below.

Hugo Rifkind

Climate change deniers are anti-science and anti-reason — and they terrify me

You know what I don’t believe in? Engineering. Shameless pseudo-science. You want to watch out for those so-called ‘engineers’. See that bridge that fell down in Cumbria the other day? Lordy, they’ll be cashing in on that. Up they’ll pop with their ‘stress points’ and ‘foundations’ and other such insider-ish, clubby mumbo-jumbo. As though any of it actually meant something. As though bridges hadn’t been falling down forever, for no particular reason at all. And medicine? God, that’s even worse. I mean, sure, sometimes you get a fever and somebody gives you some pills and you get better, but is there really a link? I doubt it. Kick up a fuss, though, and they freeze you out. They’ll stifle you.

James Delingpole

What idiocy it is to regard whiteness as a problem in need of a remedy

‘Oh please let no one call Trevor McDonald a nignog. Oh, please. Oh please!’ It was sometime towards the end of the 1980s (before Britain’s first black newsreader got his knighthood) and my brother, my sister and I were standing on the pavement watching the village carnival go by, each of us offering up the same silent prayer to the heavens. The place was Topsham, a village on the river Exe, a few miles outside Exeter, where our mother had just moved in with a lovely chap named Frank. Trevor was the local celebrity, the carnival guest of honour and also the Only Black Man In The Village. None of us had really thought of Trevor as being black before. (Well he isn’t really, is he?

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Religion is like a jigsaw: it makes a picture out of puzzling chaos

It hardly struck me, as I set out for a couple of days in Somerset, that they would lead me to Bridport in Dorset, thence to Dame Margaret Drabble, to the history of the jigsaw puzzle, and finally to some melancholy reflections on the meaning of life. But of such apparently random pieces are jigsaws made, and sometimes they do make a picture. We’d seen a day of hurricane-force gales along the south coast last Saturday, when our Somerset hosts remarked that they’d bought tickets for a talk by Margaret Drabble at the Bridport Literary Festival early that evening, and were planning to drive over to the town before supper — and would anyone care to come? Gales notwithstanding, Margaret Drabble was there on time, in a scarlet silk tunic and red shoes.

Saturday

James Delingpole

I’m famous at last — thanks to the internet (and this column)

I don’t know quite how to put this without sounding nauseatingly smug or dangerously hubristic, but I think I might finally have become almost-famous. The revelation occurred while I was doing Vanessa Feltz’s show on BBC Radio London. I was burbling away in my usual self-hating way about how needy I am and unappreciated, and Vanessa said: ‘You know a lot of listeners are going to be quite puzzled by that, because you’re a successful columnist with a huge audience and you’re broadcasting to thousands of people right now.’ And I thought, ‘Bloody hell, Vanessa. You’re right.’ Sure I’m not famous enough to be mobbed in the street, or get tables in restaurants, or have gorgeous random females forever hurling their bodies at me.

Hugo Rifkind

Is running a country just too big a job for anyone?

You don’t expect people to take their political inspiration from Jon Bon Jovi. Or at least I don’t. Maybe that’s terribly presumptuous of me. Maybe some people do. ‘Tommy used to work on the docks/ Union’s been on strike/ He’s down on his luck, it’s tough/ so tough.’ Maybe that’s what got Tony Blair up in the morning. A decade of New Labour, ‘Livin’ on a Prayer’. It’s not entirely impossible, although I did always think that New Jersey’s most accessible rock star was more about bouffant hair and catchy guitar solos than hardcore political philosophy. Mind you, I always thought much the same about Tony Blair.

James Forsyth

The trouble with Grieve: Cameron may regret leaving the law to a lawyer

James Forsyth reviews the week in Politics After a good meal, Tory MPs like to play a game: guess the first resignation from David Cameron’s Cabinet. For a party that loves plots and intrigue, this goes some way to making up for the fact that everyone will be on their best behaviour between now and the election. When it comes to who might walk on a point of principle, one name comes up more frequently than any other: Dominic Grieve, the shadow justice secretary. This is, perhaps, appropriate given that Grieve was thrust into the limelight by David Davis’s self-immolation over 42 days.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Alan Johnson is right: the boss should make the decisions; the experts should advise

I have an independent financial adviser. I can recommend him. He gives me expert advice. But I decide, and sometimes I disagree. Nobody would question either the propriety or the commonplace nature of this arrangement. Recently we were discussing what to do with my maturing pension fund. His suggestions looked shrewd but were predicated on a measure of resumed economic growth and the persistence for some years of low interest rates. His assessment was well-informed and would be widely shared.

James Forsyth

The expenses scandal has delighted the Tories — it keeps Brown in power

James Forsyth reviews the week in Politics To step into the House of Commons nowadays is like gatecrashing a wake. In happier days, its corridors were full of MPs quietly plotting. Now, the scene is members being offered a supportive squeeze of the shoulder by a colleague. The ones being consoled are those who have been ‘Legged’ — to use a phrase — ordered to repay substantial sums of money by Sir Thomas Legg. There is no gloating over the fate of these unfortunates; too many MPs know it could have been them. For scores of MPs, such concerns have supplanted normal politics.

Saturday

James Delingpole

You Know It Makes Sense | 31 October 2009

The global warming lobby, and the terrier who won’t let go two lines If the devil is in the detail then Satan’s foremost emissary on earth must be Christopher Booker. The Booker does the kind of proper, old-school things that journalists hardly ever bother with in this new age of aggregation and flip bloggery: he digs, he makes the calls, he reads the small print, he takes up the cause of the little man and campaigns, he speaks truth to power without fear or favour. In my eyes — admittedly biased because he has become a bit of a mate — Booker is way more significant and heroic a journalist than that fellow Old Salopian hack (and tedious leftie) Paul Foot. Indeed I’d rate him among the greatest of the age.

Hugo Rifkind

Shared Opinion | 31 October 2009

Watch what you say. There may be people around who haven’t really been listening ‘Say what you like about servicemen amputees,’ said the comedian Jimmy Carr on stage last week, ‘but we’re going to have a f–—g good paralympic team in 2012.’ Odd to see Patrick Mercer, of all people, calling on him to resign. From what, though? From leaving the house? Maybe Mercer thought this self-employed stand-up comedian was somebody else. Some sort of junior minister for Agriculture and Fisheries, perhaps. Scottish, obviously, with a name like Jimmy. Maybe one of those fat ones who used to hang around with Michael Martin, who all have faces like sanctimonious haemorrhoids. ‘He said what? Well, he should bloody resign. Like I had to.

James Forsyth

The Tories’ push to scupper President Blair is the highest form of flattery

James Forsyth reviews the week in politics When William Hague put on his masterful performance at the Dispatch Box last year, imagining how Gordon Brown would feel as President Blair’s motorcade pulled into Downing Street, it seemed the funniest thing in the world to the Tories. But the last laugh may yet be on them. The idea of President Blair is now featuring in their own nightmares — especially given how unpopular David Cameron expects to be after the first year of his cuts agenda. One Tory elder is warning friends: within 18 months, Blair may yet again be the most popular politician in Britain. A Blair EU presidency is not (yet) regarded as probable, but the prospect already has Westminster in a fluster.

Saturday

Matthew Parris

Another Voice | 24 October 2009

If you’re me, one of the ways you know that broadcasters are getting desperate for a ‘balancing’ voice to counter a popular point of view is that large numbers of them start telephoning you. You realise they must be scraping the barrel. Never more so, of course, than when what’s sought is that elusive beast, an articulate right-winger who isn’t totally Neanderthal. I generally tell them (always good advice in a tight corner) to try Peter Hitchens or Janet Daley.